And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
Was Christ a man like us?-Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!
For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.
Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!
For eager teachers seized my youth, pruned my faith and trimmed my fire. Showed me the high, white star of truth, there bade me gaze and there aspire.
He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the “Iliad” itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.
But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.
Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.
Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.